Donald Clark Plan B

What is Plan B? Not Plan A!

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Too cool for school: 10 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in education

1. Do pupils buy them? NO

I'm writing this on a laptop. I have an
iPad but wouldn’t dream of using it for research, note taking, writing or
business. It’s used in our house as a sort of look-up device, more ‘search, see
and watch’ than ‘write, create and work’. My kids never use it. When I asked
them if any of their mates had bought one, they laughed. No way, “Well pricy
for what it is – they all have laptops”. They want something for Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, email, sound/video editing, games, coding and bitorrent. Of my two sons, one has
a Macbook, the other a juiced up PC. I never use my iPad as I’m mostly writing and
communicating – it’s just too awkward and limited.

2. Do students buy them? NO

Beyond school,
college and university, students seem to prefer laptops, again for
note-taking, essay writing and so on. They want the flexibility of a full-milk
computer, not a ‘look-good’ consumer device. Our lecture halls are not full of
tablets. Students research, communicate and, above all, need to write substantial amounts of text, even code. Tablets don't do it for them.

3. Do employees use them? NO

Then there’s
the workplace. I’ve yet to see a workplace that has decided to standardise on iPads or tablets, unless it’s for esoteric reasons around ‘agency’ image.
Again, at work, people want full-milk, networked computers that allow them to
do functional tasks, quickly. When I see an iPad in the workplace it’s usually in
the hands of an older person at meetings, where they finger-peck notes (slowly),
struggle to download documents and spreadsheets, and are often the very people
who demand paper copies of all the working papers before the meeting. I’m happy
with my £299 netbook and no paper.

So why this rush to get iPads and tablets into schools?

Putting aside
this buying evidence, why the obsession with iPads? I don’t buy the arguments
and wouldn’t buy the kit. If, like me, you see education as producing
autonomous people who can create a life where they feel confident with
technology, gather skills in its use and get the most out of it at home and
work, an iPad or tablet is an odd choice and here’s why….

5. Writing

Core to
primary, secondary and tertiary education is the basic skill of writing.
Children need to be encouraged to write a lot to learn, whether it is note
taking, assignments, reports, data manipulation, creative writing or essays.
Touch-screen keyboards are awkward with high error rates and the process of storing,
networking and printing from iPads is tortuous. This takes us back to the
Victorian slate, indeed it is worse than a slate. I have one and find it easier
to write on the slate than type into an iPad. Interestingly, you may hold young
learners back from writing by providing a device that is so hostile to its
creation. To respond by saying that you can buy keyboards for tablets is to
admit defeat. It’s saying tablets only work when you turn them into laptops.
And the additional costs?

6. Creative work

Tablets are
for content consumption, laptops content creation. Just because things look
good on an iPad doesn’t mean they’re easy to make on an iPad. The tools of
creation in most trades and areas of art and design are very different from the
tools of delivery. Try using Photoshop or Illustrator or 3D Studio on a tablet.
Try doing pixel by pixel selection, layers and pinpoint adjustments. The screen
is simply not big enough for this sort of work. It’s a hand held device not a
working tool. Tablets are rare in the world of work and the writing, keyboard
skills and skills with tools you may need in the real world of work are
unlikely to be learnt on an iPad.

7. IT/ICT/Coding

Whatever the
aims of learning IT/ICT/coding in schools, I don’t think the iPad or tablets
are appropriate. Learning how to manipulate a spreadsheet on an iPad is
painful. Learning to code, ridiculous. Who in their right mind would use touchscreen
to code, which involves lots of detailed writing, deleting, inserting as well as
a more open environment.

8. Consumer not learning device

Above all,
the iPad is a CONSUMER device, read not write. It has a role in learning,
especially with pre-school and early years children but beyond that there is no
serious argument for large scale investments in tablets. The proof is that when
real school kids and students buy computers, they do not buy tablets. They buy
computers, netbooks and laptops.

9. Teacher unfriendly

Here’s a school that swapped its laptops for iPads and wantsto switch back, “the staff room is full of regret” and teaching problems were
clear. Technically they proved a nightmare. Many teachers and teacher resources
are in Word and Powerpoint, which has proved a problem in some schools. Some
teachers have had to resort to remoting content, leaving you open to connection
problems. There were also problems with the iPads 4:3 output on screens and
web/proxy filters. But the big one is storage and the lack of a USB port. This
means using more complicated methods such as Dropbox with all the attendant
problems. It is not a teacher-friendly device. Without a deep understanding of
software and teacher-needs, the advantages for learners may go unrealised.

10. Expensive

iPads are
expensive to buy and repair, and are difficult in terms of networking and
peripherals. They are designed to be used casually in the home, not in school,
the lab or classroom. This is born out in Honywood Community
Science School, a recently formed Academy, that bought 1200 iPads at a cost of
£500,000 where half are now broken. So there’s a real question over the
robustness of the technology in a school and in school bags, where they get
knocked, dropped and scratched. What’s more, 20% of those sent for repair were
on their second trip, some on their third. Although parents were asked to pay
£50, the devices cost £400 each and there seemed to be a problem with getting
pupils to look after something which they hadn’t bought. The true cost, when
one adds actual repair costs will prove very high indeed.

Vanity projects

A very
knowledgeable person, who attended a high-level Government meeting that
arranged to get tablets into schools, told me that it was painful and
shambolic. The school got its donated tablets from the global IT company and
they were duly delivered to the school, where the Headteacher hid them from the
teachers. The whole exercise was a case study in how NOT to use technology in
schools i.e. buy a load of cool kit, deliver it in boxes and hope for the best.
This is the danger with tablet projects, the driver is rarely a full needs
analysis on the most appropriate technology and that people are driven by Apple
hype or Apple fanboy advisors. We need to avoid bandwagon, vanity projects that
assume what’s consumer cool for adults is cool for school.

I’ve spent
the whole of my adult life encouraging the use of technology in learning but
want to make sure that we don’t repeatedly shoot ourselves in the feet with
projects that have not taken the above seven points into consideration. To be
honest I’m not at all sure about shoehorning technology into classrooms. Let
teachers teach or if you do introduce this stuff – use a good portion of budget
for teacher training.

Conclusion

Good
technology always has an allure and iPads have tons of allure, but it’s an
allure that appeals to adults not children. I can see a use for tablets with young children 3-9 and perhaps in special needs. Once
beyond the basics of play, the iPad is a luxury that schools cannot afford.
Neither are they desirable in terms of the type of learning that schools
largely deliver. These initiatives are often technology and not learning-led.

Note that
this is not an attack on iPads and tablets. I bought one and like it. It’s a
set of arguments against their use in education. Learners at school, college
and university do not buy them with their own money. Neither do they use them
when given the choice. Even if they were provided, they are largely
inappropriate for writing, tools, IT/ICT/coding and other curriculum tasks.
That’s because they are essentially output, not input, consumer devices, read
not write, with an emphasis on consumption, not creation. Teacher friendly they
are not.

PS
I'm conscious that I may be missing something here and keen to hear about research on actual improvements in attainment, as opposed to qualitative surveys and questionnaires.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Sperling: most important man you’ve maybe never heard of in online learning

John Sperling (92) is my sort of
guy. Dirt poor background, 50s beatnik, merchant seaman, activist and self-made
billionaire, who founder of the University of Phoenix in 1973, one of the most
successful educational organisations in the world, built on a mixture of online
learning and traditional course delivery. As they say of education “If you want to move a graveyard, don’t
expect much help from the occupants!” Sperling understood this and as a
maverick educator and pioneer in adult and vocational learning, opened up a
challenge to traditional education.

You’ve got to love a man who
became an entrepreneur at 53, campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis, funds
longevity and environmental research, funded the first cloned cat and contributed
large amounts of money to the Obama campaign.

Jumped
ship

Sperling was born into a poor
background, dyslectic and was seriously ill as a child, spending six months in
bed. He became a seaman, shipyard worker then academic and trade-unionist.
Unsatisfied with being a professor at San Hose State University, he started to
create vocational courses but became disillusioned with the view that a
University didn’t need more students. At this point he decided to jump ship.

University
of Phoenix

Sperling came late to
education and resented the traditional model that sees the 18 year-old
undergraduate as the archetypical learner. He was also critical of the poor
pedagogy and teaching in traditional Universities and wanted to create a modern
institution that focused on the student, with new models of teaching. So he cleverly
grabbed the University of Phoenix brand and from those ashes created one of the
largest Universities in the world.

Faced with ferocious, and as
he describes it ‘mean-spirited’,
opposition from all quarters of the educational establishment, he forged ahead.
This was long before the internet matured but Sperling spotted the opportunity
to learn online and built systems that fuelled the growth of the University of
Phoenix, which had to fight against traditional educational detractors, even to
survive. The success of the project in student numbers, output and business
terms has all but silenced these sceptics.

Unusually, for a billionaire,
he is left-leaning and driven by a passion for helping poor students get education
and jobs. It was Sperling who opened up the educational landscape in the US and
elsewhere, so that 12% of all US undergraduates are at private universities and
take up 24% of grants for low-income students. In The Great Divide: Retro
Vs. Metro America we see a highly political animal, fighting for the Democratic
Party and against the old racial, ethnic, religious, political and geographical
divides in the US.

Learning
from Sperling

What can we learn from Sperling?

Innovation comes from outside. Innovation in education tends to come from outsiders. Sperling
was a maverick who succeeded because he was not hidebound by tradition and
institutional inertia. With the objectivity of the outsider who entered the
system with some worldly experience, he felt it was narrow, overly-academic, had
poor pedagogy and not at all meritocratic. Education is a slow learner and
needs to be hurried along by external tutors.

Technology scales. He showed that technology, within reason and in a blended
context, was the key to reducing cost, personalising learning and capable of meeting
the need of students who didn’t want to be campus-bound. Most pedagogic
advances have indeed been made from technology, such as search (Google),
crowdsourced knowledge (Wikipedia), video instruction (YouTube) and so on.
Sperling was among the first to apply online technology to volume courses in Higher
Education.

Higher Ed is NOT just about 18 year
olds. Adult learning (lifelong
learning) has come of age and the 18 year old undergraduate is no longer the
sole model for Higher education. Sperling, came to tertiary education late and
saw how poorly he was treated. Convinced that there was a mass market in
vocational and adult education, he created one of the largest universities in
the world, largely on the back of the promise of employment.

Vocational learning matters. Mass youth and graduate unemployment has taken root in
many countries around the world and governments now recognise that an
educational system too weighted towards academic subjects may do as much harm
as good. Economies with a good blend of academic and vocational, such as
Germany and some countries in the Far East flourish, while those that have the
dead hand of history on their education systems falter. Everyone has to leave
school sometime and to leave vocational learning poorly funded is a mistake,

Criticism

The University of Phoenix,
with over 500,000 students, is now part of the Apollo Group, an international private
educational group, that owns BPP in the UK, and universities in Chile and
Mexico. But it is not without its critics.

The University of Phoenix,
and its clones in private education, have been accused of luring unsuitable
candidates into courses that prove unsuitable, resulting in high drop-out
rates. The result is large numbers of students saddled with debt, that don’t
end up with any real advantage in the job market. Sperling has responded, by
some pretty tough lobbying in Washington, arguing that his model enfranchised
huge numbers of people and that drop-out is common in many traditional
educational institutions, and that one would expect it to be higher in his
demographic.

In his book For-profit
Higher Education: Developing a World Class Workforce (1997), a look at three
types of funded education; 1) public, 2) not-for-profit and 3) for-profit, he gave
an analysis that showed public and not-for-profit education incurred state costs
of several thousand dollars a year, compared to the gains of several hundreds
of dollars a year for students from for-profit organisations. This is an
interesting analysis in that it attempts to lay bare the complete (and complex)
cost model. Sperling has a PhD in Economics from Cambridge and understands the cost
variables that are often quietly ignored by those justifying ever-higher levels
of state funding in education. This has turned into a complex, but healthy,
debate in the US around the true cost of education, including drop-out rates, defaults
on loans, lost opportunity costs and so on, something that is starting to
happen elsewhere in the world, as debt-driven, economic woes stalk the planet.
Whatever, your political beliefs, it is vital we address the true economics of
education, to optimise the system as we go forward.

Conclusion

Sperling is a provocateur,
constantly at odds with the establishment views on education and other topics
but has always been committed to students from poor backgrounds. His principles
include; ignoring
your detractors, taking ‘bet-your shirt’ risks, challenging authority and never
setting a goal.This unorthodox approach to
education and business has broken the mould and shown that online education
works on scale for adults who won’t or can’t conform to traditional timetables
and courses. As one of the most successful examples of online learning on the
planet Sperling is a true innovator in online learning.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Prensky: game on - digital natives, immigrants and aliens

Mark Prensky is a lively New
Yorker and ex-teacher who set the pace on the use of games in learning with his
evangelistic book Digital Game-Based
Learning (2001). Prensky claims that today's educators/trainers and learners are from separate worlds. Sure, learners have a short attention span nowadays -
for the old ways of learning! His point is that the old ways are inappropriate
for the new generation of learners. His argument is that games make learning cool. School and most learning experiences are
not cool.

Digital
natives’ versus ‘Digital immigrants’

Yes, it was Prensky who was
responsible for this useful, and some claim, overused phrase. These terms have
become commonplace and Marc has done a great deal to make them common currency
in the learning field. Digital natives
are those who grew up with computers, texting, searching, games consoles and
thrashing about in software – the twitch generation. Digital immigrants are those who have had to enter their world and
learn about them later in life. Then there’s the often forgotten, but not
uncommon Digital aliens are those who
remain outside of the system.

There has been much criticism
of this distinction as being too black and white, encouraging the view that
all young people have full, online, literacy skills, which they clearly do not.
However, the distinction is a useful heuristic device in that it points to the
obvious generational shift in terms of the commonplace use of online
technology, especially computer games. There has been a demographic switch and
demonstrably higher use of technology by younger people. They literally learn
technology skills at a very young age, such as texting, posting, messaging
and increasingly the use of cameras and images. His arguments about context are clear.

Some prefer the generational
distinctions, so loved by marketeers, and argue that these are better researched,
such as generation and Milennials. However, many of the critics are academics, like
Michael Wesch, who see digital literacy in terms of research not search,
citations not everyday use. They claim, astoundinglt, that there is no real difference. This is not
born out by the usage stats on social media, txting, gaming and use of mobile
devices. Since the debate we have seen the Arab Spring, where social media is
now seen as a necessary condition for success, and the massive rise of global
social media and mobile penetration.

To be fair Marc has moved on
and his redefinition towards ‘Digital Wisdom’ has tackled some of the older
criticisms. His argument is that education has a problem with relevance,
context and audience. The curriculum, he believes, is antiquated, the world for
which students are taught has irreversibly changed to include both personal and
workplace technology and the students have new experiences and different expectations.

A more interesting debate
lies around the prescriptive need to use technology in learning, to meet these expectations. Bennett (2008) in the British Journal of Educational technology, argued
that there is no such need. However, it is Bennett, not Prensky,who makes the Manichean
claim of an ‘insurmountable gap’. Her ‘Australian’ claims about low access by
primary school children (less than 5%) is unsupported and at odds with the real
data. She claims that it is difficult to get data on access, it is not. We know
a great deal about who has access to what device, where and their use. Digital
technology gives you a surplus of useful, automatically gathered data. In her
search for an absolute set of activities practiced by all young people, she
sets the bar so high that she is bound to fail. This is a clear case of firig an arrow, then drawing a cahlak cirle round it to say you've hot the target. Sure, there’s variation in use
but we know a great deal about this. Take two examples, texting and Facebook.
There will be a distribution curve for use of these activities and it is undoubtedly skewed
towards younger demographics, similarly with game playing.

I’m with Prensky on this. We
have seen huge changes in pedagogy, especially since 2000, with search (Google),
crowdsourced knowledge bases, video (Wikipedia), audio (podcasts), hyperlinks
and social media. These are all radical pedagogic shifts that require new
skills. To suggest that we do not need to change the target and method of
teaching is quite simply wrong.

Games
and motivation

The real power in the book
comes from the arguments he gathers on motivation, and using game techniques to
improve learning. Games' designers know a lot about motivation. They have to -
or their games won't sell. There is, therefore, real mileage in taking the
magic dust of game design and sprinkling it on learning.

His analysis of what makes
games tick is exemplary and matched by a similarly strong analysis on learning
in relation to simulations. The difficulty, however, is in bringing these two
worlds together, and Prensky is not entirely convincing in making these two
worlds congruent. Games may not be as widely applicable in education and
training as he imagines.

Light
on the downside

As one would expect, and as
with any book that takes a single, strong line - traditional learning bad,
games good – he is light on arguments against games in learning. These include:
violence, gender gaps, distractive elements, extra cognitive effort,
disappointment and a whole raft of arguments against the use of games in
reflective, higher forms of learning.

For example, it is quite
difficult to argue that the violence in games has no effect whatsoever on
players, then argue that games make great sense for behavioural change, for
example in military simulations. Why has the military spent so much on games,
simulations and even a free downloadable game with over a million players if it
has no psychological effect?

This is a dimension to the
'games in learning' debate that is often underestimated by the games
evangelists. Games often have no educational value, and, even worse, can
distract, disappoint or even destroy learning.

Distraction - if the learning
objectives are not congruent with the game objectives you run a real danger of
distracting learners from the learning. Learners become obsessed with progress,
scores and other non-learning components in the game, to the detriment of the
content. Even in real computer games, players will go to enormous lengths to
obtain cheats.

Disappointment - this is a
danger where the learner is set up to experience a game which actually turns
out to be a rather weak affair. Children brought up on a diet of blockbuster
real-time games are often bored by poorly designed educational games.

Destruction - in some cases,
games can even destroy learning. This is the argument put forward by Postman.
If game-playing induces an expectation that learning must always be an amusing
experience, then setting such an expectation risks producing the opposite
effect in contexts where amusement is absent. In this way, a games-based
approach might undermine other more traditional forms of education and
training.

However, it is a matter of
pay-offs. The advantages of motivation, learning through failure, level
structures, simulations, constant feedback and repeated practice may outweigh
the disadvantages. More recenctly we have seen an emphasis on gamification that
takes a more measured approach to the use of gaming in learning, taking scoring
and some strong pedagogic features of games to sue in learning experiences.

Conclusion

Some also argue that games
may turn out a generation with better IQs, better skills, more attuned to
technology with a more enlightened learner-centric attitude towards learning
than any previous generation. Many also argue that we should harness the
strength of games, while setting their weaknesses to the side. In any case
Prensky was a pioneer and tireless campaigner for games in learning.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Jakob Nielsen,
a Dane, has long campaigned for better usability on the internet. A ferocious critic of excessive and self-absorbed web design, especially Flash,
and highly critical of designers who see the medium as a mere form of
expression, rather than performing real acts of communication and learning, he offers sage advice on best practice is based on actual user responses (thinking aloun and eyetracking).

Best practice

A key concept for Nielsen is
consistency. Users, he claims, crave for consistency. They expect to learn how
to use a website or piece of online learning, but don’t expect to worry about
the rules changing. The unexpected breaks the user’s confidence in the system
making them feel insecure. This is especially destructive in online learning,
where the cognitive dissonance disrupts the learning experience. In general, what’s important for Nielsen in screen interfaces is:

Easy to learn

Efficiency

Memorability

Low error rate

Satisfaction

This is why it is
important to test, through voiced user trials. Users matter as users are either
your customers or learners. Annoy them or switch them off any you switch off
revenue or learning.

Eyetracking

As readers scan screen text, far more
than they scan written text, Nielsen advises corrective techniques:

subheads

bulleted lists

highlighted keywords

short paragraphs

a simple writing style

de-fluffed
language devoid of marketese

His later three
year, eyetracking trials confirmed how little text people actually read on
websites. Heat maps and gaze plots were used to recommend best practice on page layout, menus, site elements, images and advertising.This was a more objective form of user-watching, and ‘thinking
aloud’ which has remained his primary method of testing for over two decades.

Flash 99% BAD

His famous ‘Flash: 99% Bad’ article characterised
Flash as a usability disease. He does not criticise the tool itself, only its
tendency to work against usability. Flash makes things unusable for three main reasons.

First, it
encourages design abuse through gratuitous
animation. Since we canmake things move, why notmake things
move? It’s not that animation has no role to play, only that, on the whole, it’s
a distraction. Interestingly, this was backed up in detailed research by Mayer.
Animation takes up useful cognitive attention and distracts from learning
unless it is relevant and purposeful.

Second, it
reduces the granularity of user control, reverting to presentation type
sequences. Flash sequences at the start of websites are among the most
indulgent and annoying feature of the web. This also annoys users and learners
and contributes to users switching off attention.

Third,
non-standard interfaces are introduced and not easy to use by users and
learners who are used to more common conventions. True and disturbing.

These
usability problems are not inherent in Flash and use of this tool has improved
over the years. Indeed, he developed usability guidelines for Flash (that were
mostly ignored). His position remains as follows, “The problem with most Flash is that it’s irrelevant and gets in the
way of users. The download time is only one of the many problems, and even with
instantaneous download, users prefer to visit sites that contain more
straightforward content.

However, much
Flash design continues to encourage these types of abuse. In the end Flash,
like many proprietary tools, has become a cul-de-sac and seems to be on the way
out. It arose because of the weaknesses of HTML, especially in not supporting
video. Then, with Apple declaring war on Flash, and Google getting on board, we’ve gone through a period of black
squares and requests for plug-ins. HTML5 now means that coders do not have to
rely on Adobe’s Flash or Shockwave to achieve results. Mobile has also led to
the abandonment of Flash. Nielsen is not the only one that will not be sorry.

Accessibility

Nielsen’s
study on Disabled Accessibility: The
Pragmatic Approach, showed that accessibility problems should come as no
surprise, ‘After all, countless usability
studies of websites and intranets have documented severe usability problems,
low success rates, and sub-optimal user performance, even when testing users
with no disabilities.’ In general, improving accessibility improves
usability, which in turn improves performance, leading to cost benefits and
savings.

The value of
Jakob Nielsen’s prioritised approach is that he undertook real accessibility
trials of websites with users with several different types of disabilities on a
range of assistive technologies, including a control group. His conclusions
could be said to run against the grain, in that he recommends a pragmatic,
gradual approach to making existing websites (and online learning) accessible. His
advice has largely been ignored by an over-prescriptive approach to
accessibility, whereas most have quietly adopted his pragatic approach.

Criticism

It can be
argued that users also want aesthetic and other effects which enhance their
experience when using screen-based interfaces. His ‘ideal’ websites and home
pages do leave one underwhelmed. So they have a point, especially in learning,
where motivation and sustained attention are important. There are many tribes
in web and online learning design – usability experts. Like Krug, Norman and
Nielsen, learning experts, graphic artists, who treasure their aesthetic and
design judgements, coders and the customer, who often wants to impress their
bosses (and users) with something that looks, well ‘flash’. Most websites and
online learning are therefore compromises.

Yet, his work
remains relevant, especially in pointing to the excesses of elaborate design.
He’s not arguing for ugly content, only usable content. He has no problem with
using readable fonts, especially for longer pieces of text. Few notice that
Arial is the default font in Wikipedia but it is, and with good reason. On the
whole, readers tend to prefer non-serif fonts like Arial, Verdana or Tahoma for
screen text. Nielsen’s point is that, in the end, it’s users that matter and
successful businesses, like Google and Amazon, keep things simple.

Bad internal search

He claims
that the biggest fault in contemporary web design is bad internal search. Poor
headlines and page summaries are another bugbear. He feels that too little of
the budget is spent on this feature. I have to agree. What users enter into
your search box is perhaps the most important data you can gather. It shows
what users, and not designers, really want.

Conclusion

Nielsen is
not afraid to challenge those who see the internet as a medium for designers as
opposed to users. His user-centred research confirms, time and time again, that
real people want simpler, more consistent and less elaborate models and
content. His advice, informed as it is by research, is invaluable for
e-learning and web designers alike. But we should be cautious about seeing
everything solely through the Puritan eyes of the usability expert as there are
other qualities that matter in some contexts. On the whole however, he’s just
plain right.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Norman: tech should be 'invisible' in learning

Let's face it we all have problems in using technology and software. My own pet hate is screen projectors, I'm sure you can name a few. This space between humans and technology is messy. Donald Norman’s touchstone for successful technology is
that it should be invisible, intuitive
and so easy to use that we can focus on the real task. Technology must conform
to human needs, not the other way around. We must therefore use ‘user-centred
design’ to humanise technology. This is true ergonomically but also true of
interfaces which should render technology invisible.

Usability and learning

Usability, or user-centric design, is critical in online
learning, as the crippling restraints of working memory mean that any cognitive
overload or unnecessary cognitive effort on navigation will, by definition,
squeeze out or delay learning. I see this time and time again with confusing
menus, icons, whizzy graphics and unnecessary clutter. Distractions destroy
attention, so confusion in navigation and usability undercuts learning.

Technology first, invention second,
needs last

Although Norman is an academic, he believes that technology
drives progress in user interfaces and design, providing lots of incremental
changes in functionality and usability. He is no believer in ethnographic oracademic studies that attempt to find out what people do and want. In this
sense he is a follower of Brian Arthur and believes that ‘science, engineering and tinkerers’ produce the real progress.
Research should focus on user-centred research on actual devices to make
improvements, not try to define the future.

The Psychology of Everyday Things

Norman made his name with The Psychology of Everyday Things, where he takes a wry look at
product design in everyday objects such as computers, telephones, car windows,
dashboards, doors etc. to show good and bad practice. It’s full of examples
explaining why people push when they should pull, click the wrong buttons and
generally fail to complete the simplest of everyday tasks with physical and
online technology.

Don’t keep user in dark

His advice is straightforward and has plenty of relevance
in online learning and web design. His first rule is ‘Design for usability’. Usability, or ease of use, is paramount.
Don’t make navigation difficult. Make things visible – don’t keep the user in
the dark. A good example of how this goes wrong is the poor use of icons in
navigation. Programmes sometimes have graphics that look like icons but are not
active, merely illustrative. You click on them and nothing happens. Even worse,
you may click on an image or icon and something unexpected happens.

Mapping

Mapping is another of his principles in design. To steer
a car you turn the wheel to the right to go right and left to go left. This is
mapping. Apply this to navigation on the screen. To go forward the arrow should
face to the right and left to go back. Pull fingers a[part on touch screens to
enlarge, pull together to reduce in size. In general, in navigation, feedback
(another Norman design principle) is also important. You need to know when
you’ve arrived at a destination.

Use conventions & coherence

In his later works, such as The Invisible Computer he tackles, not objects, but computer
interfaces. How do new users understand what to do? First, follow conventional
usage, both in the choice of images and the allowable interactions. Convention
can constrain creativity, but on the whole, unless we follow the major
conventions, we usually fail. Those who violate conventions, even when they are
convinced that their new method is superior, are doomed to fail. You cannot
successfully introduce a non-qwerty keyboard today, or reverse the window
scroll bar convention. For better or for worse, human culture changes slowly,
if at all.

Use words to describe the desired action (e.g. ‘click
here’ or use labels in front of perceived objects). Words alone cannot solve
the problem, for there still must be some way of knowing what action and where
it is to be done. This requires a convention of highlighting, or outlining, or
depiction of an actionable object. It is also well known that single word
labels fail for most people. Thus, road signs often use graphics - an
international standard on road sign graphics exists.

Follow a coherent conceptual model so that once part of
the interface is learned, the same principles apply to other parts. Coherent
conceptual models are valuable and necessary, but there still remains the
bootstrapping problem; how does one learn the model in the first place? Use conventions,
words, and metaphors to increase invisibility.

3 forms of emotional design

Do screen
projectors, alarm-clock radios, lights in hotel rooms annoy the hell out of you?
Have you given up trying to programme your household heating system? Norman
sees our emotional responses to design in terms of:

Visceral (appearance)

Behavioural
(performance)

Reflective (memories and experience)

Interestingly he thinks Americans value 2 more than 1&3,
whereas Europeans, at least the cultural classes, value 1&3. This is
fascinating. He claims that different people buy things with different fuel mixtures
of the three emotions. Different companies design to different types of
emotions. Greta companies deliver all three.

As he explains in Living with Complexity, it is
not that technology delivers too much complexity. The fact is, we live in a
world of complexity, with complex technologies that do complex things. Live
with it – that’s reality. The enemy is not complexity, it is dreadful design. You
should not be expected to shake out some salt or pepper on to your hand to
determine which cellar contains what. Complexity needs to be tamed, masked or
made invisible with good design.

Conclusion

Norman’s books can be a bit trying to read as they jump
between different styles and approaches. Nevertheless, they constantly
illuminate the design process. A consistent critic of inconsistent and gimmicky
web design as well as common mistakes in the design of hardware and interfaces,
he was a pioneer in seeing user-centred design as a game changing force, not
only in real-world objects, but also on the screen. We are only now starting to
see the importance of his advice in online learning and web design with
interfaces which are truly invisible in the sense that that they allow learners
to learn, avoiding the cognitive effort taken to use a cumbersome interface.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

The humble hyperlink has now had a profound effect on
learning. It is the ‘warp drive’ of online learning. You can find, locate, explain,
look, buy, sell, bid, follow, friend; literally go at hyper-speed to new worlds.
We now do it without thinking, in every Google search, Facebook update and
Tweet. It is the springboard to further knowledge and takes you in leaps to
people, places, products and pleasures you would never have dreamed off before
the coming of the web.

Hyperlinked brain

Knowledge is not held in our minds alphabetically or in a
linear or hierarchical menu structure. Knowledge is held in different ways,
procedural, episodic, semantic, and called up into working memory, but it is
fundamentally a neural network,
physically and representationally. A hyperlinked representation of knowledge is
therefore a much more useful learning tool as it reflects this structure and
allows us to learn new knowledge structures that fit into our existing
pre-requisite networks. These networks are personal and hyperlinked networks
allow us to move through knowledge in a way that fits our existing structures,
expectations and intentions. The brain is hyperlinked and so knowledge needs to
be for efficient learning.

Knowledge wants to be free

You can tell that knowledge wanted to be free from the tyrannical,
linearity of print by the evolution of the page itself, page numbers, footnotes,
appendices and indexes, all things we find in print used to find things
quickly, follow up, expand on a topic or go off and find another suitable text.
These physical link devices, in print, show a yearning for hyperlinks long
before they were actionable on the web. This yearning is driven by curiosity
and learning.

Break with linear past

Hyperlinks are therefore profound in that they make a break
with the largely linear past. Print, film, television and radio are not neutral
in terms of their pedagogy. They are linear media that instil linear habits in
learners. Books are greatly loved but their linear format and print publishing
formats, it has been argued, have led to long linear formats that trap learners
into a specific view by a specific author. Long reading lists have become the norm
in Higher Education, which is more process than pedagogy. I have argued that
this ‘reading’ of texts from lecterns led directly to the one hour,
uninterrupted, linear lecture, which is a pedagogic dead-end. Broadcast
television led to half hour and one hour formats that were blown apart by
YouTube, Khan and TED. Overlong formats tied to schedules. Similarly with
radio, freed by podcasts. Both video and audio have been time shifted and can
be used by learners where and when they want to.

Further opportunities for learning

At one level hyperlinks can be used for simple clarification
by linking to the meaning of a word or glossary definition. More expansively
they can link to citations or other links on the web. However, their real force
is in following your line of inquiry into more detail. Far from being a shallow
medium, the web offers much depth through such links. Wikipedia has lots of
useful links making it a network of knowledge, unlike paper encyclopaedias,
arranged alphabetically. This makes the knowledge base more useful as there’s
not only more opportunity for further research, it’s faster and one can get
back in a click.

Social media and links

Hyperlink holds the web and networks together, the links
between content and people. It’s the ‘social’ glue in social networking that
hold people and people together. Facebook and Twitter are packed with
hyperlinks and people tweet links as a matter of course. Social media is
hyperlinking.

Adding a hashtag (#) to a string of letters in Twitter e.g. #todaysevent brings Tweets under that
name together, so that you can click on or search for what’s being said under
that topic. This is what allows things to trend. This takes hyperlinking to a
new level, acting as metadata for a search. It not only aids search, it has
allowed people to Tweet learning conferences, talks, lectures etc. and others
to read their tweets, amplifying the event. Similarly, with @donaldclark, used to tag Tweeters. This
is hyperlinking to streams of past and live content.

Web and links

Links were seen by Tim Bernard Lee as a fundamental part of
HTML. He understood the importance of links as a navigational feature from
within documents and screens. The cleverness of a hyperlink is that it can leap
to a URL, webpage or place within a webpage, even a file or page within a PDF
file. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) attribute a font, colour and style, even
have a hover box. It is important that hyperlinks are clearly differentiated on
screens and it is good design practice in online learning to avoid images and
words that look like they hyperlink but don’t.

Object hyperlinking

The web of things connects objects with embedded computers.
This is everything from mobile phones, household appliances, clothes, cars,
sensors and so on. These are already used to control household energy
consumption. Work is being done on wirelessly, linked devices such as
Tricorders that record vital physiological signs, even blood analysis for
dynamically gathering data about your health. Protocols have already been
developed for such links. This has interesting possibilities in learning as it
extends the reach of simulations and learning by doing.

Invisible adaptive hand

But something far more radical has happened with hyperlinks.
Google and other large scale web companies, like Facebook an Amazon, have
algorithms that harvest links and their use. The quality and quantity of links
matters and that data is used to refine search and drive recommendation engines.
So, behind the scenes, links are used to improve search and recommendations and
therefore improve the speed and quality of learning experiences.

This is the promise of ‘adaptive’ learning, from companies
like Cogbooks, where algorithms get to ‘know’ your pre-requisites and needs,
then deliver learning to you, like a SatNav, keeping you going in the right direction
and getting you back on course when you go astray or get stuck.

Hyperlink as MOOP

As a MOOP (Massive Online Open Pedagogy), the pedagogic
power of hyperlinks is immense. They are immediately available to the learner
at the appropriate point in their personal learning experience, can immediately
link to any other point in any other digital asset, reducing research time, and
the learner can get back through the browser to the point of departure.
Hyperlinks are automated, research pathways, available to the curious and
critical learner. It fees learners from the linear constraints of print and
reaches out into links to other media, such as video, animation, graphics,
images and audio, greatly expanding the possibilities for more efficient
learning. They also work behind the scenes in search and recommendation engines
to improve the power of the learning experience for the individual.

Downside

There is, of course, the danger that we suffer in learning from having too many links and therefor too many choices. We've all, at some time, found ourselves linking and vectoring away across the web and not having gained much. While this is true, the freedom of choice is largely a positive thing in learning. It frees us from fixed, linear narratives and opens up the possibility of multiple sources and a breadth and depth of opportunities unknown in our history. It is a far more natural way of dealing with new learning as it matches the way our brains learn. In all of these senses it is irreversibly positive.

Conclusion

Like all great technology the humble hyperlink has become so
well loved and used that it has become all but invisible. We use them
constantly but are barely aware of their immense power. They are literally
intuitive extensions from the web that is our brain to and from the web and
eventually to the internet of things. Above all, hyperlinks enable personalised
learning. It’s wonderfully simple and may turn out to be one of the greatest
inventions in the history of communications and learning.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Mosquitos and turtles: how to fund great education projects

I was first
up to speak, after the Minister, at NESTA, that’s Nick Hurd, the Minister for
Civil Society (they’ve lost the Big Society as it turned out to be so minuscule it fell out of the policy briefcase and no one can now find it). He looks
uncannily like George Osborne, not surprising, as he’s yet another Eton,
Bullington boy, and made a couple of interesting points and announcements. 1) Public sector risk averse but
can't now afford to be. Needs infrastructure of support 2) Social Innovation Camp will support up
to 72 tech based social ventures. Wayra Ultd will support 30 digitally focused
start-ups. Was he sincere? I doubt it – he left early.

Geek talk

The room was rammed, not even standing room,
and we had some excellent case studies of ‘social good’ projects in health,
local government and coding, also some interesting views from investors. It was
all good stuff and I applaud everyone in that room, as they’re actually DOING
STUFF.

But the danger in these events is in settling
into a sort of London luv-in. As soon as I hear the words ‘geek’ or ‘hackathon’
I reach, like Goebbels, for my gun, as I know I’ve entered the dated world of techy-yesteryear.
I bumped into my old Head of Programing, Brian Rodway, on the train back to
Brighton, he works for a games company that made £35 million profit last year –
don’t call him a geek. He hates the ghettoization of coders and coding.

Mosquitos & turtles

I’m here because I have a foot in both camps:
private and public sector. I’ve run, helped and invested in private sector
companies but, having cashed-in, I turned my attention to do some public good
in the education sector in a large charity.

Let’s start with a distinction. First,
there’s what I call MOSQUITO projects, that sound buzzy but lack leadership,
real substance, scalability and sustainability, and they’re short-lived, often
dying as soon as the funding runs out or academic paper is published. Then
there’s TURTLES, sometimes duller but with substance, scalability and
sustainability, and they’re long-lived. With any luck they’ll be around for
decades.

So, what’s a funder like NESTA, Nominet,
Education Foundation, Omidyar or UFI to do? First avoid creating large pools of
cash that breed mosquito projects with open calls and long-winded application
processes, Second, don’t just open your doors and windows to mosquito bids, go
looking for turtles – they’re more secretive and bury their eggs in the dark –
but they’re there. Be selective.

Note that MOSQUITO projects need not be
small, they can be huge AND short-lived. Molenet, NHSU, BBC Jam, many JISC and
EU projects (not all) in online learning, are largely mosquito projects. Doomed
to succeed in funding but fail in execution.

Crossing the chasm

My point was that crossing the chasm requires
some characteristics that are often missing in public sector funding in the
education market. Too many projects fail to cross the chasm as they lack the
four Ss.:

Senior management team

Sales & marketing

Scalability

Sustainability

There are two dangers here. First,
understimulating the market so that the mosquito projects fall into the gap as
they fail to find customers and revenues. This is rarely to do with a lack of
technical or coding skills but far more often a paucity of management, sales
and marketing skills.

The other danger is overstimulating the
market with large projects that stop real innovative projects from evolving and
bridging the gap. The danger here is that the large dollops of cash go into too
much product development and not enough market development.

There’s another danger and that’s bogging
projects down in overlong academic research, where one must go at the glacial
speed of the academic year and not the market. These projects lose momentum,
focus and, in any case, no one pays much attention to the results. As the old
saying goes, “When you want to move a
graveyard, don’t expect much help from the occupants.”

Either way a serious problem is the lack of
strategic thinking and a coherent set of sales and marketing actions. When
people think of ‘scale’ they think of technical scale, but that goes without
saying on the web, it’s a given. What projects need is market scale. What is
your addressable market? Let’s take an example – schools. Where are the
budgets? Who are the buyers? Who will you actually sell to? How big is the
market? Do you realise that Scotland has a different curriculum? What market
share do you expect? Who are your competitors? Answer these questions and you
may very well decide to find a proper job.

We need to distinguish between noise and
hard-nosed reality. Ghettoising social good through abstruse language and
labels is not the point. You can call it ‘Impact funding’, but what’s needed is
evidence of impact. Targeted funding and real impact is the point. One sign of
the ghettoization, is that despite the fact that I invited the audience, at the
start of my talk, to speak to me afterwards, as I’m a Trustee in a charity with
£50 million to spent on tech projects, not one person came up to me and asked
me for my card. When you network, speak to people you don’t know, not the
people you know. That was a missed ‘sales’ opportunity for many in the room. It
may be the case, and I’m not saying I’m certain here, that sales and marketing
courses is what’s needed, not geekfests and hackathons.

Conclusion

I have to congratulate Katie and the folks at
NESTA for organising the event. There’s a lot of energy, talent and entrepreneurial
spirit around. There’s also some great people around in NESTA, Nominet Trust and
other agencies. There just has to be a more efficient way of speed dating
companies and investors to make things happen a little faster. Finally, I
apologise of anyone feels that I’m completely off the page here, but I was
asked to give my opinion based on my personal experience and that’s what I did. I've focused on the potential problems as that's what we need to avoid.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

YouTube another MOOP (Massive Open Online Pedagogy) Learning will not be televised, it will be digitised.

Alfie Days is one of my son's friends, lives in the next street, and his Pointlessblog has nearly half a million YouTube subscribers, and at 19 earns a lot more than his parents. This is the power of YouTube.
I'm not in that league but often start lectures and talks with the statement that the lecture or talk is a waste of time if it's not recorded and put up on YouTube, as many more people will watch online than offline. This is an obvious pedagogic benefit - you reach more learners. But its a lesson that's lost on most traditional educators, who largely deliver once-only, sheep-dip experiences. You're restricted to numbers in the hundreds or a thousand or two at conferences but online, the sky's the limit.

Learning platform

YouTube is
the new television, the largest audio-visual channel in history and the second
largest search engine, after Google. Over a thousand people earn over $100,000
from YouTube advertising on their channels and over a million earn other sums.
It has uncovered new ways of watching, patterns of attention and new ways of
interacting with an audience. In short, it is a new learning platform that
breaks many of the old rules around learning.

Unlike
education, the web has a habit of producing pedagogic models that have massive
user adoption. Short, instructive video is one such Massive Open Online
Pedagogy (MOOP). YouTube showed that short, video clips have a serious
contribution to play in learning. YouTube EDU put lectures online but if anything this was the old world porting its old bad practices into the new world. A bad one hour lecture isn't made better by putting it on YouTube and believe me, YouTube EDU is jammed with bad lectures. It’s TED,
Khan, Thrun and the millions of other short instructional videos that have
irreversibly changed the learning landscape. These are innovators who understand the use of video in learning and have adapted it to their audience's needs. Education will not be televised,
it will be digitised.

Hurley and Chen

Chad Hurley
and Steven Chen are the founders of YouTube, one of the most successful and
remarkable websites ever created. Hurley studied Fine Art; Chen Science and
Maths. They met when they both worked at PayPal and three years later founded
YouTube in 2005. It was sold to Google for £1.65 billion in 2006. Youtube’s word
of mouth and word of mouse recommendations, starting with Saturday Night Live’s
Lazy Sunday clip, led to immediate exponential growth.

How it works

Anyone can
upload and share their clips (up to 10 minutes) for free. You can upload in a
whole range of video formats which are then converted to Flash Video (.flv) for
presentation on the YouTube site, a format that is widely compatible. The video
clips also have some HTML that allows them to be linked to from blogs and other
sites, with an autoplay feature. This is especially useful in social media
where both feed off each other.

Education and training

Although set
up to share entertainment, often funny and surreal, it now has thousands of
education and training clips. Its mass appeal has allowed it to build and
support a service that has a strong brand and a robust infrastructure. It has
grown as a bottom-up repository and now contains a huge wealth of useful
content in subjects as diverse as language learning, science, medicine,
mechanics, plumbing and so on. You name it, YouTube will show you how to do it.

Its pedagogic
power comes from the sheer size of the repository and range of content. Like
Wikipedia it is growing exponentially and as more serious content appears,
teachers, trainers, lecturers and learners can use this content as a free
resource.

KISS (Keep It Short Stupid)

YouTube has
certainly influenced the way video appears and is shown on the web. Most of the
clips have the pedagogic advantage of being short, avoiding overlong,
instructional content and therefore cognitive overload. It has put paid to the
half hour and one hour programme, driven by broadcast TV, which was only that
length as it had to fit timetabled schedules. How long should an instructional
video be? Only as long as it needs to be and no longer i.e. short.

Quality and learning

A second
change is that many of these short clips are often low on production values
(less of an issue now as even low cost cameras produce high quality images.
This confirms the research by Nass and Reeves at Stanford, who showed that the
quality of video is not an important factor in learning and retention. This is
because our visual system has evolved to cope with low quality images such as
poor light conditions and so on. Note that the quality of audio does have a strong
effect on learning and retention. You can’t get away with tinny or variable
volume in your audio.

New pedagogic approaches in video

Creatively, YouTube
has spawned lots of new genres of video instruction:

Khan blackboard and coloured chalk – simple but effective as the learner’s
mind is not cluttered with seeing Khan – it’s the semantic content that
matters, not talking heads.

Thrun’s hand and whiteboard – again it’s not Thrun’s head that matters but seeing
worked problems and solutions.

RSA animations
– clever animations that end up as a single infographic.

TED talks – shows
how lectures should be – passionate experts, no notes, no reading, little
PowerPoint and short.

Software demos
– just show me the steps one by one.

Physical demos
– point the camera at the engine, radiator or whatever I need to fix and show
me how to do it, with commentary. I just take my tablet to the place I need it.

Learning by
doing has always suffered in the unreal world of the classroom and school. An
important advance has been made through YouTube in vocational and practical learning,
where real tasks are shown on video. These often involve the manipulation of
real objects and the demonstration of processes, all of which can be seen full
screen, increasingly on portable tablets and mobile devices. The pedagogy of learning
by doing can be brought into the learning environment via YouTube.

Video and motor skills

Even sports
and other motor skills can benefit from coaching on YouTube. Musical education
has been revolutionised by the demonstration of fingers on chords and other
techniques. Sports coaching in almost every imaginable sport is commonplace

TED talks

Easily denigrated,
the talking head is still popular on YouTube. The video blog, expert talk and
many other examples of someone giving their all, is still there. TED is perhaps
the most interesting example, a respected brand that focuses on the expert speaker
to deliver punchy sessions that eschew traditional lecturing for short,
passionate and informative talks. TED gives strict instructions to their
speakers and understands that video and lectures are not
about the transfer of knowledge but the passion of the expert and a vision.

What you don’t
see much of on YouTube is drama. It’s not that drama can’t be used for teaching
and learning, just that it’s expensive and difficult to produce. Corporate
training videos used to be full of TV presenter-led instructional videos and
drama (I know I used to make them). This has died a death and often seems
rather wooden and indulgent.

Context missing

Beyond ‘channels’
what YouTube doesn’t give you is context or structure. People like Roger Schank
recommend indexing videos and using learner-led questions to find video
answers, especially from a bank of experts. Khan has software that
contextualises maths in terms of pre-requisites and so on. In other words,
video often needs to be used in a blended context if the learning experience is
to have breadth and depth. Nevertheless, there’s still a massive role for the
one-off video that solves one query or practical problem.

Conclusion

YouTube has
the advantage of being a powerful global brand. The fact that video cameras
have become cheap, even embedded in phones, has meant the massive creation of
content, as well as watching. It is shaping the way video is created,
distributed and watched on the web. It has the potential to act as a vast
education and training resource of free content, lowering costs for learning.
More than this, it has introduced pedagogic changes around the use of video;
its length, quality, format and breadth of uses. As a pedagogic approach it is
clearly useful in both formal and informal learning, an enduring Massive Open
Online Pedagogy (MOOP).

Monday, February 11, 2013

Google: first MOOP (Massive Online Open Pedagogy)

Seek and you will find

As a kid I never imagined, when watching Star Trek, that
I really would have a little device on which I could ask any question, and it would
almost certainly give me a meaningful answer. Science fiction came true and I
have one next to me now and its main tool is Google search. Google search is
probably the most profound pedagogic shift in the history of learning, not a
game changer but a previously unimaginable shift towards universal access to
anything, anytime from anywhere.

Montessori kids

Brin was born in Russia and educated in the US, Page is
from Michigan. Like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Mahatma
Gandhi, Sigmund Freud, Buckminster Fuller, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean
Piaget and Hilary and Bill Clinton before them, they both attended Montessori
schools. Indeed, they both credit their Montessori education for much of their
success. It was the Montessori experience, they claim, that made them
self-directed, allowing them to think for themselves and pursue their real
interests.

They only met in 1995, at Stanford, yet their business,
Google, famously based on a spelling error (Google should have been Googol),
has become one of the most significant global businesses of our times. The
company floated in 2004 and is run as a triumvirate of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page
and Sergei Brin.

Most
potent, pedagogic, productivity tool ever

As the world’s most successful search engine it has
become an indispensable tool for learning and research. It’s a way of learning
that has touched almost everyone in the developed and increasingly developing
world. Search has transformed the way we search for information and has changed
our very relationship with knowledge, making a significant contribution to the
very idea of what needs to be learnt and newer. It is, arguably, the single
most powerful, pedagogic, productivity tool we have ever seen.

Google – game changer in learning

Google's mission is to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and
useful’. Specialist searching of text, images, video, books, blogs, academic
papers, news, and maps, has given the ordinary user unparalleled access to
knowledge stored across different media.

Their mathematical approach to search problems at
Stanford led to a search engine that ranked sites by popularity. In addition,
the more we search, the greater the data Google has and the better their search
engine becomes. As their scalable model looked at links, so the larger the web
became the better their engine became.

It is the speed and efficiency of such search that has
accelerated our ability as learners to identify relevant knowledge. Learners of
all ages and abilities see the web as a useful source of knowledge. Of course,
Google also relies on knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, Journals and many
other sources to deliver content.

Researchers, from schoolchildren with projects to
advanced researchers in educational institutions, now find Google an
indispensable tool. As online access to research Journals and scholarly
knowledge bases increases, so search has become an indispensable tool.

Google tools and learning

Google Education provides a rack of useful tools for
education. Thie rapprocah is to provide productivity tools, not content. Gmail
has given users a free email service with substantial amounts of storage. Google
Calendar provides individual and shared calendars. Google docs, shared
documents. Google+ collaboration and hangouts. Google translate for languages.
Google Scholar is even more precise in its intention.

Google Earth and Google Maps are astonishing tools for
learning and research. Blogger, owned by Google, provides free blogging
software to tens of millions of bloggers. YouTube is the world’s greatest,
searchable repository for videos, now a mainstream source of content for
learning. These promise to put even more power in the hands of learners,
freeing us from the traditional limitations of paper-based libraries and
physical ‘places’ of learning.

Outsourced memory

When most knowledge is easily searchable the need to
learn and memorise knowledge starts to recede. Indeed, in the corporate world,
it is clear that modern managers rely less on knowledge and more on skills.
Memory is, in a sense, outsourced, placing less of an emphasis on rote learning
and memorisation.

Many argue that this is also true of schooling, where the
traditional model has been rote learning and memorisation, as opposed to
critical thinking and other skills. Teaching students how to search may be as
powerful a skill, as teaching them to read and write. Indeed, Google have a
free course that does just that.

Google may also have altered our general idea of what
constitutes knowledge. You have to learn to see knowledge as varying in quality
and certainty, distinguish different sources in terms of their reliability. On
the other hand, some suggest Google search has made us fickle, lazy and
fragmented in our learning.

Digital Maoism

Google has
its detractors. Jared Lanier warns against ‘digital Maoism’ aided and abetted
by Google, that may take the wisdom of the crown and turn us all into slavish
followers or tribal groups. The subterfuge is that Google monetises your search
data and is “selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying
habits, etc.] back to themselves“. He goes further in his latest book The
Fate of Power and the Future ofDignity claiming that the financial crash and
future economy may be undermined by techno-utopianism, where we unwittingly
submit to becoming become advertising fodder. These are interesting arguments
and well worth noting but they tend to ignore the simple pay-off, that I gain
more personally than I risk. Most people seem happy to give up their search
data to get such a fee, powerful and useful product in return.

Googling the future

Google are so
ambitious and have so many projects on the go that it is difficult to predict
where they are heading. Now that they have tentacles into every online and
offline person, organisation and place on the planet, including the planet
itself, it seems likely that they will move beyond search through an expanding
suite of tools to become your personal assistant for almost everything you want
in life – knowledge, shopping, jobs…. However, it’s hard to see where Google X’s
projects, supervised by Brin, such as the driverless car and Google Glass fit
in.

Let’s not
forget that Google gave us the Android mobile operating system, a welcome
alternative to the closed world of Apple and a strategy one that seems to be
paying off. Apple’s walled world is at odds with Google’s open world and in the
long term my money’s on Google. Look out for Android games consoles, such as
the Ouya. Android’s important as it eats into the OS market with phones,
tablets and laptops like the Chromebook.

Conclusion

Page and Brin have created a toolset that has already
revolutionised access to knowledge. Their organisation continues to
revolutionise learning and to ‘organize
the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’. The
scale of this task is enormous and on-going. It is truly an example of
technology making a huge impact on the nature, future and efficacy of learning,
a truly momentus pedagogic force. Search as a Massive Open Online Pedagogy
(MOOP) is something that is was around before MOOCs and will be around long after
MOOCs are gone. It’s long-term effect on learning is irreversible and profound.

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Jane Hart: Me Jane ‘tools and social media guru’ in the learning jungle!

Jane Hart was awarded the Colin Corder Award last week, and although I
honestly have no idea who Colin Cordon is, if anyone deserves an award in this
sector it is Jane! Jane Hart, like Jay Cross, has taken her inspiration from
the fundamental truth that most people, most of the time, learn most -
informally. Yet most learning professionals, mostly deliver fixed courses at
fixed times. Jane has always attempted to free us from the course mentality
into a more dynamic model of learning.

But Jane is not all talk, she’s all action
and has been incredibly generous with her research and knowledge. Best known
for her website, the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, which is packed full of useful free advice, she has, since
2005, provided a well respected set of free resources for the learning community.

Tools

Jane’s regular survey’s on tools in learning is a useful way
of polling the industry to feedback useful data on what’s new, useful and
practical in learning tools. Her Top 100 Tools in Learning has proved very
popular. Not content with just collating the list she also provides a useful
Practical Guide to the use of these 100 tools. These quick guides show you how
to use the tools for your personal learning, professional development or the
production of education and training. Although tools in themselves are only a
small part of the solution, as you don’t make a novelist by simply giving
someone a word processor, it is important to identify the most used and best of
breed tools.

I have listed these as it shows another string to Jane’s
considerable bow. Note that most (not all) of these tools are social media
tools or have a social media angle. She
has been tireless in her recognition and promotion of social media in learning.

More than all of the above is her underlying effort to increase
the productivity of learning. Jane is far
from being just a tools wonk or social media evangelist. When it comes to the
jungle of real organisations, she’s more Tarzan than Jane. Her understanding of
learning in general, cultural barriers and real implementation is considerable.
She gives excellent talks and webinars on how to get this done, in a practical
fashion, within your organisation. This is all about improvements, productivity
and performance.

Conclusion

Jane is one of those people who has focus. Rather than
trying to be all things to all people she has mined a single, rich vein, which
happened to be one of the most important developments in the last 50 years in
learning; the recognition that informal learning, social media and the use of technology
tools will give us huge gains in learning. Lastly, and this is important folks
- she is also a terribly nice person!